My favorite day

Well, Thursday is one of my favorite days. It's not the flashiest day of the week, certainly not a Friday or Saturday. Nor is the Day of Rest, or the Wednesday fulcrum of the week, or laborious Monday. I'd say it's most like Tuesday--they're both good, solid, roll-up-your sleeves sorts of days. I'd say it's among the mellowest days of the week. Anyway, that said, I was pleased for my birthday last week to fall on a Thursday--September 8.

And this Thursday was almost as good. In clinic this afternoon, I watched the dark clouds roll across the sky and the rain drops began to bead on the windows. A downpour greeted me as I left the parking garage (which, thankfully, is accessible by an enclosed walkway), and the rush hour traffic--slowed even more by the rain--prompted me to take an alternate route home which took me by a gigantic used book store. It's hard to pass this used book store and not stop...today was no exception.

The rain pounded the metal ceiling as I bowsed for five, ten, thirty minutes. An hour and a half after entering the store, I emerged carrying several new treasures, obtained at 20% off the marked price:

1. A CD of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields playing Beethoven's Fifth and Eighth Symphonies
2. A book of Stephen King's "delightfully titillating and creepy" short stories as described and recommended by a friend here.
3. An interesting vocabulary book.
4. A book of a collection of medical photographs from the nineteenth century. A cursory skim in the bookstore belied the appalling graphics found in this book. This is the sort of book a child would naughtily puruse with guilty and horrified fascination. At least I can keep it as I do have an established interest in medicine. My favorite is the black and white photo of the orbital abscess which causes the eye and lids to protrude out and down. We should all take a minute and be thankful for the advances in medical science over the last hundred years
5. A Philadelphia guidebook, purchased in preparation for my trip next week to the "Windy City."

By this point, the rain had let up, and so I rolled down the car's windows on this warm, humid evening. The noise of the traffic competed with Beethoven's signature rhythm as I rolled down the expressway home. I especially enjoyed seeing the sunlight, poking through a still cloud-covered sky, glinting off the gold cross at the apex of the newly finished steeple of the hundred-year-old church downtown. (How many prepositions in that sentence?)